Old and New Masters eBook

cut down by a Puritan. He has hung all the candles
of his faith on the sacred thorn, like the lights
on a Christmas-tree, and lo! it has been cut down and
cast out of England with as little respect as though
it were a verse from the Sermon on the Mount.
It may be that Mr. Chesterton’s sight is erratic,
and that what he took to be the sacred thorn was really
a Upas-tree. But in a sense that does not matter.
He is entitled to his own fable, if he tells it honestly
and beautifully; and it is as a tragic fable or romance
of the downfall of liberty in England that one reads
his History. He himself contends in the
last chapter of the book that the crisis in English
history came “with the fall of Richard II, following
on his failures to use mediaeval despotism in the interests
of mediaeval democracy.” Mr. Chesterton’s
history would hardly be worth reading, if he had made
nothing more of it than is suggested in that sentence.
His book (apart from occasional sloughs of sophistry
and fallacious argument) remains in the mind as a
song of praise and dolour chanted by the imagination
about an England that obeyed not God and despised
the Tree of Life, but that may yet, he believes, hear
once more the ancestral voices, and with her sons
arrayed in trade unions and guilds, march riotously
back into the Garden of Eden.

IV.

WORDSWORTH

1. HIS PERSONALITY AND GENIUS

Dorothy Wordsworth—­whom Professor Harper
has praised not beyond reason as “the most delightful,
the most fascinating woman who has enriched literary
history”—­once confessed in a letter
about her brother William that “his person is
not in his favour,” and that he was “certainly
rather plain.” He is the most difficult
of all the great poets whom one reverences to portray
as an attractive person. “‘Horse-face,’
I have heard satirists say,” Carlyle wrote of
him, recalling a comparison of Hazlitt’s; and
the horse-face seems to be symbolic of something that
we find not only in his personal appearance, but in
his personality and his work.

His faults do not soften us, as the faults of so many
favourite writers do. They were the faults, not
of passion, but of a superior person, who was something
of a Sir Willoughby Patterne in his pompous self-satisfaction.
“He says,” records Lamb in one of his letters,
“he does not see much difficulty in writing
like Shakespeare, if he had a mind to try it.”
Lamb adds: “It is clear that nothing is
wanting but the mind.”

Leigh Hunt, after receiving a visit from Wordsworth
in 1815, remarked that “he was as sceptical
on the merit of all kinds of poetry but one as Richardson
was on those of the novels of Fielding.”
Keats, who had earlier spoken of the reverence in
which he held Wordsworth, wrote to his brother in
1818: “I am sorry that Wordsworth has left
a bad impression wherever he visited in town by his
egotism, vanity, and bigotry.” There was